Identificazione e percezione: la costruzione dell’identità linguistica nei parlanti guardioli

The purpose of this contribution is to examine the attitudes of speakers from Guardia Piemontese, an Occitan colony in Calabria, towards the minority variety. It is widely known that language attitudes play an important role both in the very definition of the speech community itself and in the transmission and subsequent preservation of languages. The method of detection and measurement used by the writer included the use of questionnaire surveys through the use of the «semantic differential» technique. It is an investigation methodology through which it is possible to measure the cognitive reactions produced by a conceptual stimulus through the use of a series of qualifications, ordered in the form of bipolar scales of judgement and usually five or seven values, with two semantically opposite qualifications at the ends. Within the questionnaire, a particular section, called the “perceptive part”, has been designed in order to investigate two important dimensions: identification and perception which have allowed the identification of the status that speakers attribute to the minority language, and therefore the further dimension of prestige. The processing of the data obtained through the analysis of composite factorial scores, has made it possible to correlate the various dimensions investigated with the variables considered (age groups, gender, level of education, etc.) and achieve the proposed objectives: to detect the attitude of speakers towards the Gardiol language in order to provide a predictive assessment of its survival within the community.